Irony and the logic of modernity / Armen Avanessian ; translated by Nils F. Schott.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Avanessian, Armen, author.

Contributor:

Schott, Nils F., translator.

Series:

Paradigms (Walter de Gruyter & Co.) ; Volume 3.

Paradigms : Literature and the Human Sciences, 2195-2205 ; Volume 3

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Irony in literature.

Irony.

Modernism (Literature).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (238 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Berlin, [Germany] ; Boston, [Massachusetts] : De Gruyter, 2015.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

The logic of modernity is an ironical logic. Modern irony, a flash of genius produced by Romantic theorists, is first discussed, e.g. in Hegel and Kierkegaard, as an ethical problem personified in figures such as the aesthete, the seducer, the flaneur, or the dandy. It fully develops in the novel, the modern genre par excellence: in novels of the early 19th century no less than in those of postmodernity or in those of the masters of citation, parody, and pastiche of classical modernism (Musil, Joyce, and Proust). This book, however, goes one step further. Looking at how such different authors as Schmitt, Kafka, and Rorty identify the political conflicts, contradictions, and paradoxes of the 20th century as ironical and offers a comprehensive account of the constitutive irony of modernity's ethical, poetical, and political logic.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Introduction

Part One: Rhetorologies

1. Successful Reconciliation

2. A Desire for Art

3. Mad Consciousness

Part Two: Ethica

1. The Irony of Evil

2. Must We Aestheticize?

3. Masking Irony

4. The Melancholic Subject

5. The Joy of Dissimulation

Part Three: Novel - Modernity - Irony

1. The Philosophy of History and the Poetics of Genre

2. The Language of the Novel

3. From Micro-irony (Quotation) to Macro-irony (Genre)

4. Novels of (De)formation and Ironic Autobiographies

Part Four: Ironic Politics

1. The Struggle with Irony

2. Thesis and Antithesis

3. The Irony of the Law (Kafka and Deleuze )

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9783110424607

3110424606

9783110424423

3110424428

OCLC:

920822711